Ask HN: How to handle a senior hire turning out to be junior?

Given the comments here, you don't have the couple months to unrust your skills. You will be deemed unfit after the first one and fired, the prevailing sentiment seems to be.

There's a classic paper out there...

The Net Negative Producing Programmer by G. Gordon Schulmey

> We've known since the early sixties, but have never come to grips with the implications that there are net negative producing programmers (NNPPs) on almost all projects, who insert enough spoilage to exceed the value of their production. So, it is important to make the bold statement: Taking a poor performer off the team can often be more productive than adding a good one. [6, p. 208] Although important, it is difficult to deal with the NNPP. Most development managers do not handle negative aspects of their programming staff well. This paper discusses how to recognize NNPPs, and remedial actions necessary for project success.

(The early 60s may be a reference to (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=421858 )

> Gordon Bell, architect of the DEC VAX wrote "High Tech Ventures" and included this section on NNP's

   Negative Productivity is a principle that I claim is worthy of a Nobel Prize. 
   Normal principles of productivity assume that workers create positive output. 
   Brooks refined the concept of software productivity to express it in terms of 
   the "mythical man month," and in software engineering, it is understood that 
   different programmers vary in their productivity by several orders of magnitude. 
   According to the principal of negative productivity, it is possible for an individual
   to produce bad results that others must then redo; hence, someone who is 
   very negatively productive can keep a whole team busy with damage control, 
   preventing the team from producing any output whatsoever.

And here it is discussed at C2 - https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer

edit: personally I think though that the company should take responsibility and make sure the employee either gets ramped up or a very smooth exit financially since the application probably meant he missed other options

Yes self-learning is better, but it takes a much longer period of time, whereas if you have a tutor, then it saves lot of time (and companies don't often have such resources, which is where AI and books fill the gap).

I strongly believe that LLMs are a serious helping tool for programming that helps programmers to onboard their project faster.

Regarding more exotic techs, as a cousin of ChatGPT, Google Gemini used to be very very bad, but with Gemini 1.5-Pro you can feed it very long documents, and this is super helpful for specific implementation (e.g. the exotic processors), and it's, really, really not bad at programming, or at least pushing you in the right direction.

Of course it's not autonomous (and whether it can be in the short-term on complex projects is unlikely), but it reduces the onboarding time, and this was the point raised in the conversation.

A dev paired with a LLM is much much more productive.

I suppose that you are concerned that it may push people to lose their jobs in the long-term. I am as well, but we still have some time ahead.

I don't like this situation either, but I have to recognize that it is a very helpful co-programming tool.

The bar is really, really low. You will have to step over it however.